24 November 2013

In my post yesterday about Cisco making the code for its H264 codec
available, I noted that the really important news was that Mozilla was
working on Daala, a fully open next generation codec. One of the key
people on the team doing that is Monty Montgomery, and he's written a
really interesting blog post
about the announcement and its background, which I recommend thoroughly
(the discussion in the comments is also very illuminating):

You know that open source has won when everybody wants to wrap
themselves in a little bit of openness in order to enjoy the glow.
That's good news - provided it represents a move to true open source and
not fauxpen source. Which brings me to the following news:

Revelations about the staggering levels of online surveillance that
are now routine in this country have been met with a stunning silence
from the UK government. There's an important meeting
tomorrow where three MPs from the main parties are trying to get some
kind of debate going on this crucial issue. It would be helpful if you
could ask your MP to participate. Here's what I've written:

I first wrote about the importance of open clinical trials two years ago. More recently, I urged people to contact their MEPs for a crucial vote that was taking place in one of the committees
in the European Parliament. The AllTrials site, which is coordinating
the fight to obtain access to this vital public health information, now
asks for help during another stage in the battle for open data:

Software patents have figured quite frequently on this blog, usually
in terms of their deep problems, especially for free software. Although
I've tended to write about what's happening in Europe and the US, the
rest of the world is also beginning to experience the same issues as
computers enter ever-more deeply into daily life there, and is similarly
seeking to come up with solutions.

My last two posts about the Linux Foundation have been about how it
is broadening its scope to embrace open projects well beyond the Linux
kernel. For example, there was the OpenDaylight Project, and then the OpenBEL. Now we have this:

As I noted in my last TTIP update,
things are beginning to get moving again on this front. One reflection
of the growing interesting in this important trade and investment
agreement was the public discussion
entitled "Internet, Trade and Democracy: Transatlantic Relations under
the Shadow of Surveillance", held in Berlin, and organised by Internet
& Society Collaboratory and the blogger project FutureChallenges.org
of the Bertelsmann Stiftung.

A couple of week ago, I discussed the awful idea of adding DRM to the official HTML5 standard, and where that would lead us. More recently, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a piece about openness that included the following comment:

It's been fairly quiet on the TAFTA/TTIP
front recently. That's largely because Europe shuts down for its summer
hols during August, and has only just got going again. Unfortunately
(for TAFTA/TTIP), the next round of negotiations has just been cancelled
because the US administration was busy being, er, not busy. But as a
consolation prize, we have a couple of documents from the European
Commission on the subject of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS),
which by a happy coincidence was the subject of my previous TTIP Update.

A couple of months ago, we reported on some interesting research into the reality
of US trade agreements, in contrast to the rosy pictures always painted
when they are being sold to the public by politicians. In particular,
it turned out that far from boosting US exports and creating more jobs,
both the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and KORUS, the free
trade agreement with South Korea, actually did the opposite --
increasing the US trade deficit with those countries, and destroying
hundreds of thousands of American jobs.

One of the ironies of European outrage over the global surveillance
conducted by the NSA and GCHQ is that in the EU, communications metadata
must be kept by law anyway, although not many people there realize it.
That's a consequence of the Data Retention Directive, passed in 2006, which:

Techdirt has been reporting for a while the efforts of the Russian government to bring the Internet there under control.
It now seems that it is taking a new approach: as well as banning or
criminalizing activities it doesn't like, it wants to compete with them
directly. Specifically, it plans to fund a new Russian search engine,
called "Sputnik", named after the first artificial satellite, put into space by the Russians in 1957. According to an article in the news magazine "Der Spiegel" (original in German), this is designed to address two problems at once.

A few months back, we wrote about the University of California's plan to lock up
even more knowledge in the form of patents, in the hope that this would
bring in lots of cash. But as Techdirt has reported time and again
over the years, patenting research does not bring in more money to fund further research, in fact it probably doesn't bring in any money
at all, once you allow for the costs of running tech transfer offices.
Moreover, there's evidence that making the results of research freely
available is much better for the wider economy than trying to turn them into intellectual monopolies.

Back in April, we noted that the Canadian government has been trying to muzzle various groups in the country, including librarians and scientists. It now seems that some scientists have had enough, as the Guardian reports:

We've noted before attempts to inflate the importance of copyright,
patents and trademarks by including a bunch of other sectors that are
only tangentially related to them when it comes to totting up their
economic impact. For example, last year Mike wrote about a joint
Department of Commerce/US Patent and Trademark Office "study" that
included 2.5 million grocery store jobs in its definition of "IP-intensive" industries.

Last week we wrote about China's worrying new censorship
approach, which threatens up to three years in prison for those
spreading "false information" if their posts are viewed 5000 times, or
forwarded 500 times. Improbable though that law is in its exactitude, it seems it has already been applied:

A month ago, we wrote about Kim Dotcom's plans to form his own political party
in New Zealand. But that's not the only way that Dotcom is going on
the attack against the system. Here's Vikram Kumar, the Chief Executive
of Dotcom's "privacy company" Mega, on another bold move:

The Internet may be a series of tubes, but those tubes have to be joined
together. That takes place at Internet exchanges (IXs), where
different ISPs can pass on and receive data. One of the largest and
most important such IXs is AMS-IX, which is based in the capital of the
Netherlands, Amsterdam. Techdirt reader Dirk Poot points out that AMS-IX has just made the following move:

One of the unfortunate consequences of the revelations about NSA spying
on just about everyone is that it creates a false impression that such
activities are really quite normal these days, and nothing much to worry
about. This probably encourages nations that don't carry out such
comprehensive snooping on their populations to think about doing so. In
Nigeria, for example, a proposal is making its way through the
legislative process that would grant the Nigerian government wide-ranging surveillance powers, as reported here by Premium Times:

In the recent demonstrations in Istanbul, the Turkish government may
have had superior police and security forces on the streets, but one
area where it lost the battle was on social networks, which
anti-government protesters used adroitly to get their viewpoint out to
the world. It seems the Turkish government has learned its lesson, and has decided to fight back according to this report in the Wall Street Journal:

It was expected
that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, would raise the issue of
NSA spying when she addressed the opening session of the UN General
Assembly in New York this week. But few would have predicted that her speech would be quite so excoriating (pdf), especially since it was given in the presence of President Obama, who spoke immediately after her.

As Techdirt has been pointingout for years,
newspaper paywalls make no sense. By stopping people from reading your
stories unless they have a subscription, you diminish your influence in
the media world, drastically reduce the number of readers and thus make
it much harder to generate revenue from them. Paywalls are also a gift to your competitors, as this story in the Guardian indicates:

As I noted a couple of years ago, one of the most important legacies
of the Hargreaves review of copyright in the digital age was its
insistence that policy must be based on evidence,
not dogma. There were some heartening signs that the UK government was
indeed following through on that, notably in terms of a series of reports
from Ofcom that explore in detail many aspects of the online use of
copyright materials - something that was simply unavailable before.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote abut a shameful move by the BBC to support adding DRM to HTML to control the playback of video content. This scheme has now moved on, and the news is astonishingly bad:

Earlier this week I posted Richard Stallman's recollections of the AI Lab at MIT, where
he first encountered and came to love the hacker world and its spirit.
That idyllic period came to an end as a result of the commercialisation
of the AI Labs' computer system, called the Lisp Machine, which led to
the destruction of the unique environment that created it in the first
place, and to its re-birth as the GNU project.

Last week I noted that the GNU project was celebrating
its 30th anniversary. I thought it might be interesting to hear what
Richard Stallman had to say about the environment in which he came up
with the idea for GNU. What follows is part of a long interview I conducted with him in 1999, when I was carrying out research for "Rebel Code". Most of this is unpublished, and offers what I hope is some insights into the hacker culture at MIT, where Stallman was working.

At the beginning of this year, I discussed a report
written for the European Parliament, which warned that the US legal
framework allowed the authorities there to spy on EU data held by any US
cloud computing service. I also noted as an interesting fact that the NSA was building a huge new data centre, and that encryption might not offer the protection we thought.

When the first Android smartphones came out, the consensus view among
certain "experts" was that Google didn't stand chance. The dogma was
that the iPhone was so perfect, and its hold on the market so strong,
that there was no way that Android could displace it. I think we can
say that hasn't proved to be the case:

Last week, I wrote an article pointing out that the NSA's
assault on cryptography, bad as it was, had a silver lining for open
source, which was less vulnerable to being subverted than closed-source
applications produced by companies. However, that raises the question:
what about the mobile world?

One of the many valuable things that come out of the Linux Foundation
is an annual review of Linux kernel development. It's just released
the 2013 edition (freely available upon registration), and the news is resoundingly good. Here are the key points.

Remember the Digital Economy Act? Surely one of the worst pieces of
UK legislation passed - or rather, rammed through - in recent years, as
readers may recall. This was inspired (if that's the right word) by the
French Hadopi scheme brought in by Nicolas Sarkozy, whereby people were
threatened with being disconnected from the Internet if they were
accused of unauthorised sharing of digital files.

A couple of weeks ago, Mike reported on the extraordinary turn of events
involving Edward Snowden's email supplier, Lavabit. The company's
owner, Ladar Levison, preferred to shut down the service rather than
hand over to the US government something that it wanted really badly --
exactly what, we don't know because of a gag order. We then learned that the mere act of shutting Lavabit down threatened to land Levison in big trouble anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt noted that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, was angry
that the NSA had been reading her private emails and text messages, and
that as a result she was contemplating cancelling an imminent
high-profile state visit to the US. That was before the recent
revelations that the NSA had also engaged in industrial espionage
at the biggest Brazilian company, Petrobras, which seems to have been
the final straw: Rousseff has now formally "postponed" her trip to the
US, according to the Brazilian news site O Globo (original in Portuguese.)

Last week we reported on the suspension
of Hadopi's one and only suspension, as France moved away from using
Internet disconnection as a punishment. That manifest failure of the
scheme that pioneered the three strikes approach makes a new paper from
the Australian scholar Rebecca Giblin, called "Evaluating graduated response",
particularly timely. As its title suggests, this is a review of the
three strikes approach in the light of the experiences in the five
countries that have adopted it: France, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea
and the UK -- even though the latter has still not put it into
practice.

One of the key issues in the debate surrounding Snowden's leaks is whether they might be threatening
our security by letting the bad people know what the NSA and GCHQ are
up to. Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of the UK's foreign
intelligence agency, MI6, doesn't think so:

In the wake of the continuing leaks about the NSA's activities, most
commentators are understandably still trying to get to grips with the
enormity of what has been happening. But John Naughton, professor of
the public understanding of technology at the UK's Open University,
tackles a very different question on his blog: what is likely to happen in the future, if things carry on as they are?

Back in June we wrote about Hadopi's first and only successful disconnection
case. As we also noted then, in the wake of its abject failure, Hadopi
was being dramatically curtailed. In particular, disconnection is no
longer available as a punishment for those alleged to have downloaded
files without authorization.

Now that Sarkozy has been thrown out of office, France is no longer
producing the steady stream of bad proposals for the Internet that it
once generated. That has left an opening for some other country to take
its place, and it seems that Russia is keen to pick up where Sarkozy
left off. We've been reporting on previous worrying developments there, and TorrentFreak has news on another one:

It would be something of an understatement to say that encryption
is a hot topic at the moment. But leaving aside deeper issues like the
extent to which the Internet's cryptographic systems are compromised,
there is a more general question about whether Web sites should be
pushing users to connect using HTTPS in the hope that this might improve
their security. That might seem a no-brainer, but for the Wikimedia
Foundation (WMF), the organization that runs Wikipedia and related
projects, it's a more complex issue.

As more and more information about the NSA's global surveillance
capabilities emerges through leaks of material obtained by Edward
Snowden, the US authorities have been playing the terrorist card
heavily. That is, they concede that they have been spying on pretty
much everyone, but claim that it was only to fight terrorism, and thus
to save lives. In particular, the NSA insists it is not spying on anyone for the purposes of industrial espionage -- here's what it wrote in an email to the Washington Post on the subject just a couple of weeks ago:

We've been reporting for several years about the extraordinary levels of secrecy
surrounding the TPP negotiations, where little information was released
about what was going on, and there were few opportunities for
representatives of civic and other groups to meet with negotiators to
present their point of view. More recently, there have been some
indications that this lack of transparency is fuelling increasing discontent among some of the participating nations.

A couple of years ago, Techdirt carried an article by Andy Kessler
about the difference between entrepreneurs who create value, and those
who lock it up. The former tend to drive prices down constantly,
innovating all the while in order to make a profit; the latter, by
contrast, typically enjoy monopolies that allow them to push up prices without offering anything more in return.

As many have already observed, the detention of David Miranda comes across as an act of blatant intimidation, as does the farcical destruction
of the Guardian's hard drives. But something doesn't ring true about
these episodes: spooks may be cynical and ruthless, but they are not
generally clueless idiots.

As long-suffering readers of this column will know, I've been
following for a while the winding road leading to the European
Commission's proposals regarding net neutrality in Europe. Along the
way, there have been many twists and turns, with hints of first one
direction, then another. But today, the Commission has finally released
its plans - not just for this area, but for the whole telecoms market in Europe:

Revelations from documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden that GCHQ essentially downloads the entire Internet as it enters and leaves the UK, and stores big chunks of it, was bad enough. But last week we learned that the NSA has intentionally weakened just about every aspect of online encryption:

One of the recurrent themes on this blog has been the UK government's
use - or failure to use - open source and open data. To be fair, on
the open data side, things are going pretty well. Open source was
previously conspicuous by its absence, and that is finally changing,
albeit rather slower than many of us would wish.

When Stephen Elop moved from Microsoft to run Nokia, many saw this as
part of a cunning plan to prepare the latter for purchase by the
former. There's no real evidence for that, although soon after joining,
Nokia did place the Windows Phone platform at the heart of its future
strategy, despite the many drawbacks of doing so, effectively betting
the company on the success of Windows as the third mobile platform
alongside Android and Apple.

As I've pointed out many times in previous posts, one of the key
benefits of mandating network neutrality is that it promotes innovation
by creating a level playing field. Such statements are all very well,
but where's the evidence? An important new study entitled "The
innovation-enhancing effects of network neutrality" [.pdf], commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs from the independent SEO Economic Research unit provides perhaps the best survey and analysis of why indeed network neutrality is so beneficial:

Back in April, I wrote
about in interesting new venture from the Linux Foundation called the
OpenDaylight Project. As I pointed out then, what made this significant
was that it showed how the Linux Foundation was beginning to move
beyond its historical origins of supporting the Linux ecosystem, towards
the broader application of the important lessons it has learnt about
open source collaboration in the process. Following that step, we now
have this:

Last year, I wrote
about some serious issues with Microsoft's Secure Boot Technology in
Windows 8. It seems that the German government has started to wake up
to problems with Windows 8, as this headline in Die Zeit attests:

If you follow me on Twitter or elsewhere, you'll have noticed that I've been tweeting rather extensively about the NSA's spying, the most recent attacks on Glenn Greenwald and now the Guardian. If you were still wondering what any of this has to do with open source, this latest news might clarify things a little:

As even a cursory glance at articles on Open Enterprise over the last
few years will indicate, open source is a massive success in
practically every market. Except, unfortunately, on the desktop
(famously) and more, generally, for consumers. And as Aral Balkan
points out in an important post from a few weeks ago, that's a real problem:

As I noted in my first TTIP Update
about the current negotiations between the EU and US over a massive
trade agreement that is far from being only about trade, it is probably
true that it will not include many of the more outrageous ideas found in
ACTA last year. But that is not to say that TTIP does not threaten many key aspects of the Internet - just that the attack is much more subtle.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the incredible spectacle of the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) attacking Mozilla
on the grounds that the latter had "lost its values" because it
insisted on defending the users' rights to control how cookies were used
on their systems.

Back in the mists of time - I'm talking about 2000 here - when free
software was still viewed by many as a rather exotic idea, I published a
book
detailing its history up to that point. Naturally, I wrote about
Apache (the Web server, not the foundation) there, since even in those
early days it was already the sectoral leader. As I pointed out:

One of the long-running jokes in the free software world is that this
year will finally be the year of open source on the desktop - just like
it was last year, and the year before that. Thanks to the astounding
rise of Android, people now realise that the desktop is last decade's
platform, and that mobile - smartphones and tablets - are the future.
But I'd argue that there is something even more important these, and
that is the widespread deployment of open source in China.

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.